Recommended Posts

Witness recalls girl's dying moments
Tuesday Mar 11 13:20 AEDT
A hotel manager has told a Sydney jury of the last words of a dying schoolgirl who had been stabbed 48 times in a carpark on the NSW Central Coast.

Giving evidence in the NSW Supreme Court, Berenice Sneesby said she remembered the father of the dying teenager, Tania Burgess, coming onto the scene.

"I remember feeling somewhat helpless," she said, after recounting how the girl had been screaming in pain.

"I remember her (Tania) talking.

"I remember looking at her and knowing that she died."

Ms Sneesby was giving evidence at the trial of a youth, now 18, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

He has pleaded not guilty to murdering 15-year-old Tania in July 2005.

She was repeatedly stabbed on her way home from school as she walked through the car park of the Forresters Beach Resort, on the NSW Central Coast.

Ms Sneesby said she had rushed from the hotel reception to the car park when a boy raised the alarm and saw a girl on the ground.

"She was screaming a lot ... she was wriggling around a lot," she said.

Ms Sneesby said she answered Tania's mobile, to be told the caller was the girl's father.

Ms Sneesby told him there had been an accident and where his daughter was.

While on the phone, she heard Tania give a boy's first name, a clsouthern end and a school.

Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC has told the jury those details matched the teenager now on trial.